An escaped slave man named Peter showing his scarred back during a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863.
Library of Congress
By the time he got to a Union encampment in Baton Rouge in March 1863, Peter had been through hell. The sleuths had chased him. He had been chased for miles, had run barefoot through streams and across fields. He had survived, if barely. When he reached the soldiers, Peter’s clothes were in tatters and soaked in mud and sweat.
But his 10-day ordeal was nothing compared to what he had already been through. During Peter’s enslavement on the Louisiana plantation of John and Bridget Lyons, Peter endured not only the indignity of slavery, but a brutal whipping that nearly cost him his life. And when he joined the Union Army after his escape from slavery, Peter exposed his scars during a medical examination.
Raised welts and machine gun marks crisscrossed his back. The marks stretched from his buttocks to his shoulders, reminiscent of the viciousness and force with which he had been beaten. It was a hideous constellation of scars: visual proof of the brutality of slavery. And for thousands of white people, it was a shocking image that helped fuel the fires of abolition during the Civil War.
A photograph of Peter’s back became one of the most widely circulated images of slavery of its time, galvanizing public opinion and serving as a silent indictment of the institution of slavery. Peter’s disfigured back helped bring the issues of the Civil War to life, contradicting Southerners’ insistence that their slavery was a matter of economic survival, not racism. And it showed just how important mass media was during the war that nearly destroyed the United States.
Not much is known about Peter other than the testimony he gave to the camp medical examiners and the image of his back and the keloid scars he suffered from his beatings. He told examiners that he had left the plantation 10 days earlier and that the man who whipped him was the plantation supervisor, Artayou Carrier. After being whipped, he was told he had gone “a bit mad” and had threatened his wife. As he lay in bed convalescing, the plantation owner fired the overseer. But Peter had already decided to escape.
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Peter and three other enslaved people escaped under the cover of night, but one of their companions was murdered by slave catchers who came in pursuit of Lyons’ property. The surviving escapees rubbed onions on their bodies to escape the bloodhounds the slave hunters used to pursue them. It was only after days of pursuit that they reached the Union encampment, weeping with joy when they were greeted by black men in uniform. They immediately enlisted.
The white soldiers who inspected Peter were horrified by his wounds. “Joining the action to the word, he knocked down the pile of dirty rags which half hid his back”, says a witness. “It sent a shudder of horror to every white person present, but the few blacks who waited… paid but little heed to the sad spectacle, such terrible scenes being painfully familiar to them all.”
But although Peter’s experience was shared by thousands of slaves, it was foreign to many Northerners who had never witnessed slavery and its brutality firsthand. Mass media was still relatively new, and although runaway slaves and other eyewitnesses told stories of whippings and other punishments in the north, few had seen the evidence of slave oppression. .
McPherson and Oliver, two traveling photographers who were at the camp, photographed Peter’s back, and the photo was reproduced and distributed as a business card, a fashionable new photographic format. Small maps were cheap to produce and became very popular during the Civil War, providing near instantaneous insight into the war and its players as it unfolded.
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Peter’s photo quickly spread throughout the country. “I found many of the approximately four hundred contraband [people who had escaped slavery and were now protected by the Union Army] JW Mercer, a Union Army surgeon in Louisiana, wrote on the back of the card. He sent it to Colonel LB Marsh.
“This map photograph should be multiplied by 100,000 and dispersed across the United States,” wrote an anonymous reporter. The image was a powerful rebuttal to the lie that slaves were treated humanely, a common refrain from those who did not believe slavery should be abolished.
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Three illustrations showing Peter after his escape, the marks of being whipped on his back and in uniform after joining the Union Army, featured in McPherson and Oliver, July 1863.
Library of Congress
Peter was not the only runaway slave whose image helped stoke anti-slavery sentiments. From the introduction of the business card in 1854, the technology became popular in abolitionist circles. Others who had escaped slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, posed for popular portraits. Sojourner Truth even used proceeds from business cards she sold during her speeches to fund speaking tours and help recruit black soldiers.
But Peter’s machine-gunned back was perhaps the most visible and significant photograph of a former slave. It was sold by abolitionists who used it to raise money for their cause and earned the name “The Scourged Back” or “Whipped Peter”. When it appeared in Harper’s Weekly, the most popular periodical of its time, it reached a wide audience. The spread also fueled confusion when Peter’s name was listed as “Gordon” instead.
The photo was also denounced as fake by the Copperheads, a nickname for a faction of Northerners who opposed the war and strongly favored the South and slave ownership. An anonymous Union Army soldier who had taken the photographs responded with a lengthy account that confirmed the veracity of the photograph. “All the logic of blind believers infatuated with human slavery cannot arrest or thwart the progress of truth, nor can it prevent the development of the positive image, when aided by the silent process and potent of chemical action,” he wrote. .
Although Peter’s body was used as evidence of the cruelty of slavery, accounts of his ordeal are saturated with the racism that pervaded American society, even among white sympathizers in the North. The Harper’s The spread called Peter “unusually intelligent and energetic”, exposing stereotypes of black people as dumb and lazy. A surgeon who was present at his examination noted that “nothing in his appearance indicates any unusual viciousness”, as if anything might warrant a whipping.
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Despite the racism of the time, Peter’s portrayal galvanized even those who had never spoken out against slavery. “What started out as a very local – even private – image eventually grew into something much bigger because it circulated so widely,” historian Bruce Laurie told the boston globe.
It is unknown what Peter did for the rest of the war, or what his life was like after the Civil War ended. Although slavery was abolished, he – and others who had been subjugated, beaten and belittled during hundreds of years of slavery in the Americas – still bore the scars of slavery.
As historian Michael Dickman notes, whipping was a common punishment on Southern plantations, although there was some debate over whether it should be used sparingly to prevent slaves from rioting. “The masters wanted to maintain order in a society in which they held positions of unquestionable authority,” he wrote. “They used the whip as a tool to enforce this view of society. Slaves, on the other hand, through their victimization and punishment, viewed whipping as the physical manifestation of their oppression under slavery.
For white Southerners and enslaved blacks, the sight of a back like Peter’s was frighteningly commonplace. For northern whites, however, Peter’s scourged body made the brutality of slavery impossible to deny. It remains one of the most well-known and gruesome images of the era.
